Marketing Insults: Wyndham Lewis and the Arthur Press

Abstract

Many of modernist writers had to resort to unusual measures to publish and distribute their work. While publishing history of works that came to dominate academic canon of twentieth-century English literature is fairly well known, that of failures is not. Probably strangest case of modernist independent publishing, and most spectacular failure in comparison to its ambitions, is Wyndham Lewis's 1930 satire The Apes of God. The publication and publicity campaign of this novel make an especially interesting study of role of private patronage and self-promotion in modernist movement because novel's subject is these very phenomena and Lewis's handling of affair recapitulated issues that novel explores. Like much experimental writing, book was too dense and idiosyncratic for a wide audience; its satiric venom also made it unpalatable for many capable of understanding it. Its additional liability was that it denounced literary world from which it needed support, and this handicap led Lewis into some unusual publicity tactics. His marketing strategy included making very economical use of satiric victims of this roman clef, some of whom were his former patrons. He sold them an expensive collector's edition, used them to promote it, and, during novel's scandalized reception, blamed them publicly for unfavorable reactions, always maintaining that he had not written about them. In addition, he impersonated his fictitious publisher to assemble a record of scandal, pamphlet Satire & Fiction, in order to prove that it was really he who was being maligned; and in its title essay he formulated a theory of scientific satire, based on an external method opposed to modernist impressionism, that would absolve him from charges of personal malice. In this ploy he re-enacted roles of two of Apes's main characters and surreptitiously confirmed contradictions of Apery that novel unmasks. The outcome, like failure of his hero's confidence game, typified unhappy fate of reputation of modernism's self-proclaimed internal Enemy. Although this episode presents a striking instance of satiric paranoia, it is more than a study in psychopathology. Apes is Lewis's most controversial work of fiction; it exemplifies factors that have consigned writer whom T. S. Eliot called the greatest prose master of style of my generation (526) to a secondary place in movement that he had helped to create. Although most of Lewis's critics concede that novel contains some of his most brilliant writing, few consider it among his best work overall; most follow Hugh Kenner's view of it as a dead end, extremity of his puppet-fiction (97), and also discount its topicality and strident antihumanism. It is true that it is an uneven, daunting work, a wild ream of sarcasm; but it is less unreadable than some modernist classics, and subtlety of its design has not been appreciated. It was a dead end for Lewis partly because it was a relative failure commercially, and it was a failure partly because in his overzealous promotion he actually hindered its distribution and directed critical discussion toward narrow aspects of it as well. But Apes is of great aesthetic as well as historical interest; indeed, its artistic achievement cannot be separated from its sociopolitical critique of modernist movement. Lewis turned Joyce's and Eliot's mythic method upon contemporary avant-garde itself and produced a prophecy of mass culture. The marketing of book adds another paradoxical layer onto an already complex tale. Lewis intended Apes to rival both Ulysses and Proust's Recherche; he staked his career on it, and he was sorest of losers. This essay concerns peculiar way in which his promotion elaborated novel's drama, and it demonstrates how Lewis's own diabolical cleverness and pride contributed to his marginalization in literary history. …